The Toba eruption
The largest eruption in two million years
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Toba ejected around 2,800 cubic kilometres of material, the largest known eruption of the Quaternary. The bottleneck hypothesis, which linked the eruption to the low genetic diversity of humans, has weakened considerably: archaeological sequences from South Africa and India show continuous occupation through the ash layer, and climate models produce less cooling than originally assumed. The case is instructive in itself — an elegant hypothesis tying two independent datasets together, which did not survive better data.
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On Sumatra a volcano exploded so violently that ash settled across all of South Asia, up to fifteen centimetres thick. The crater is now a lake a hundred kilometres long. Researchers long believed the eruption nearly wiped out humanity, but newer finds suggest people came through better than assumed.
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Part of Terra Saga — the story of Earth on a timeline. terrasaga.org